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Double Bass Playing piano (DB forum thread)

#2
rgarcia26 said:
I am looking for opinions, should a bass player know how to play piano?

I know musically will help me grow!

but at what level should a bass player, learn how to play piano?

Thanks
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Piano is a wide-ranged polyphonic instrument that is used for virtually every style of music in existence, and as the standard compositional "workbench" for just about any professional musician. You should learn the living daylights out of it if you want to have a musical mind.
 
#4
I don't know about "the living daylights", unless you would really rather be a pianist.

At the very least you should be able to sit down and play 4 part chords without counting the keys to the next note. Knowing how to voice chords and how to voice lead is great, being able to accompany yourself with the left hand while playing a melody with right would be really great.
 
#6
Yes. What everybody else said above. All bass players should know the rudiments of a first year music major, in addition to piano, that includes:

sight screaming
ear straining
piano profanity.
(Oh, excuse me -- that's how all of us felt about it at the time -- of course, I meant, sight singing, ear training and piano proficiency.:D)

You never know on a gig if you will be given charts, tabs, lead sheets, scraps of photocopied illegible hand written whatever, youtube.com links, follow the guitar/keyboard/trumpet player, etc. You gotta be able to cover it all. Some form & analysis to understand song form and verse/bridge structure helps also (12-bar blues in all keys, alternate & substituted turnarounds, the bridge usually going to the IV, etc.)
 
#7
I took piano lessons on and off from ages 5 - 13. I never kept at it long enough to really know what I was doing and didn't really have any interest in practicing. I will say that what I did learn gave me a good foundation in music theory, which helped me tremendously through school choir and when I started learning to play bass at 17 years old.

I am familiar enough with the piano where I can learn songs and even write songs in C, G and F, but not so much past that. I would say while it can be a useful tool in helping to learn and understand theory, it is not a necessary skill to become a great bassist.
 
#10
poit57 said:
I took piano lessons on and off from ages 5 - 13. I never kept at it long enough to really know what I was doing and didn't really have any interest in practicing. I will say that what I did learn gave me a good foundation in music theory, which helped me tremendously through school choir and when I started learning to play bass at 17 years old.

I am familiar enough with the piano where I can learn songs and even write songs in C, G and F, but not so much past that. I would say while it can be a useful tool in helping to learn and understand theory, it is not a necessary skill to become a great bassist.
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Wow......respectfully disagree! :cool::hiding::cool:
 
#11
Ed Fuqua said:
I don't know about "the living daylights", unless you would really rather be a pianist.

At the very least you should be able to sit down and play 4 part chords without counting the keys to the next note. Knowing how to voice chords and how to voice lead is great, being able to accompany yourself with the left hand while playing a melody with right would be really great.
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This is exactly what I do.
Even as a bass player I find it important to harmonize or reharmonize melodys at the piano.
It realy gives you perspective when you see the individual voices verticaly arranged and following there own linear path, yet still part of one unified concept. It's like seeing the whole picture, not just the bottom part.
 
#12
I don't see how you can become a good musician without some sort of harmony instrument to analyze the chordal movement. My piano skills are lacking, but not zero, so I tend to rely on my guitar chording to get me by. It's definitely a 2nd and I will work more on my piano skills, but in the mean time, guitar chording gets me, roughly, by.
 
#13
Oh yes! Definitely piano! The first response - something about it's a wide range polyphonic instrument that is the standard workbench for composition - hits the nail perfectly on the head. I had about 6 years of standard kid's piano lessons - maybe with a little more theory than the usual kid's lessons. Today I have NO piano technique. But I can visualize chords and sequences using the keyboard that is permanently tattooed inside my head. I cannot imagine how you could visualize the relationships of notes without using the keyboard - I'm sure people do it but I can't imagine any instrument that would approach how effective the piano is for this.

To extend it further, my wife is an extremely amateur player of guitar and fiddle. She had about 3 or 4 years of standard kid's lessons on piano, hated every bit of it, and thought she had not retained anything. And still, when she needs to figure something out, she goes to the piano. The fiddle is essentially a single line instrument. You can't readily visualize chords and harmonies the way you can on piano. And the guitar is a chording instrument, but the chords are all distorted to fit in the positions that can reasonably be fingered. You can't just sit down and play all the inversions of any chord, without any missing notes, on the guitar (unless you have eleven fingers on each hand and your hands are two feet long) the way you can on the piano.

If you take up piano (or electric keyboard - for the purposes of supporting your playing on another instrument I think these are almost equivalent) you have to make sure to study the stuff that is useful to an adult learning piano as a support for his main instrument. I don't think hours of technical exercises (think Hanon, Czerny!) are as helpful as theory work and enough technical to be able to execute (even slowly, or out of strict time) what is being discussed.
 
#14
Great comments, great imput, as a amateur bass player I got basic understanding of the piano, I can make up chords and play basic music, I can read both clef's, but I can't read them at the same time and I am better at the bass clef, hand independence is also a problem. Certainty time is an issue I use all my time to learn the DB. But I am thinking of at least pickup a suzuki book, to improve a little my piano skills
 
#15
Ed Fuqua said:
Without "learning and understanding theory" there is no "becoming a great bassist".
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I don't disagree with this statement. I think you misunderstood what I said. I was basically stating that for me, piano lessons helped tremendously in gaining knowledge in music theory, which helped me understand what I was doing when I started learning bass.

On the other hand, my improved piano skills over the past few years did not incorporate an expanded knowledge of theory, so it really did nothing in itself to improve me as a bass player. It was just an increase in skill due to more familiarity with a different instrument.

I'm not discouraging anyone from learning the piano or any other musical instrument, I just think the focus should be on expanded music theory knowledge first, regardless of whether any additional instruments are added to their skillset, if the overall goal is to improve on one's primary instrument.


Ed Fuqua said:
I would remind you, also, to check the header of the thread you're posting in.
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I missed that this was in the orchestral technique forum regarding DB because I was linked here from the front page, but this seems like a more general topic that applies to both DB and BG players alike. My opinion on music theory remains the same no matter what instrument or style of music is being played, and I feel that my opinion is still relevant even if I'm not a DB player.
 
#20
David Potts said:
If you ever want to teach bass, or music in general, then playing a keyboard or piano will be a real strength and well worth the effort now.

Cheers,
DP
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I agree. In my case it happened by accident since I switched from being a piano player to being a DB player, but I can't imagine teaching without being able to sit down and immediately play the sounds I'm trying to describe all the time.
 

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